


Rehabilitated

by sterlingsuspenders



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Post-Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 19:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4449398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterlingsuspenders/pseuds/sterlingsuspenders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stark's press release calls him “rehabilitated,” but Bucky doesn't feel rehabilitated at all. He feels like a feral animal on a short leash. He feels like gnawing his own leg off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rehabilitated

Bucky doesn't know what he and Steve Rogers had, only that it must have been a secret.

So he dragged Steve from the water. So what? He doesn't go looking for Steve, after. Except—well, except that he also doesn't make himself hard to be found. He's a master assassin, a professional at disappearing without a trace, but he doesn't run. It's no shock when Steve finds him. Hell, he practically left breadcrumbs all the way to his door. He can't help but wonder if there's really much of a difference between seeking Steve Rogers out and just waiting to be found by him.

The only thing he saved, in the end, was his pride. And even that gets called to question when Stark prods and pries at his metal arm and Banner runs him through a physical. It's sickeningly familiar, if he's honest. He's been a lab rat long as he can remember.

“You can trust them, Buck,” Steve promises and he just stares back at the man, feeling the same kind of hollow he's always felt on an operating table. Trust—the word means nothing to him. His missions never had anything to do with trust; he was made to follow orders. He has always been a weapon.

Steve calls him Bucky, and as much as it doesn't feel like it belongs to him, at least it's a name. The Winter Soldier was never a name; it wasn't even a title. It was a threat. A ghost story. Steve calls him Bucky like the name matters, somehow, and Bucky lets him. He might as well.

Even weeks after he's settled in to Steve's apartment, English still feels too heavy on his tongue. It's clumsy, unfamiliar. They tell him it's his native language, but it feels no more his than any of the other dozen languages he learned from Hydra. Even when he starts to remember growing up in Brooklyn, English still feels like a facade he put on for a mark. It's a mask, more than anything. To often, he thinks he might wake up and find himself in the country he swore his allegiance to.

They say he swore it to this one, first.

An American war hero. What a joke.

(“But we kissed,” Bucky snarls, caught between desperate rage and dizzy confusion when Steve pushes him back. Three months of living with Steve, and Steve only ever calls him his best friend—even if his touches linger, even if he stares. Even if Bucky can remember bits and pieces that don't fit together clean but always, always star Steve. Like everything in his life has always been pointing directly to the man in front of him. The man who, just seconds ago, Bucky had pinned to the wall, had moaning into his mouth. The man who pushed Bucky away just as surely as he'd kissed him back.

Now, Steve stares at him with something that looks like guilt but could too easily be pity and Bucky wants to tear into him—wants to rip him apart until something makes sense.

“I remember,” he insists, “I remember that we kissed.” It's barely a fragment of a memory: two bodies, so much smaller than they are now, tipped together in the cold, clumsy mouths and clumsier hands. It's foggy, but it's real. He remembers.

He doesn't understand the way Steve's face changes, only that he hates the soft tone Steve takes with him—like it's the first week again and Bucky is a skittish animal Steve doesn't want to startle. “We weren't—it wasn't like that, Buck.”

Bucky isn't foolish enough to believe that's the whole story, but Steve doesn't want to touch him and Bucky doesn't want to look at him.

It's that night that he locks himself in the bathroom and buzzes his hair short with Steve's electric razor. The hairs at the nape of his neck are prickly under his touch. When he comes out, he doesn't look anything like the Winter Soldier. He doesn't look much like Bucky, either. There's something triumphant in the way Steve's breath catches when he walks back into the living room and settles on the couch.

Small victories, he supposes.)

It's almost a week later when the gaps in Bucky's memory fill in enough for him to realize that they were drunk for that first kiss. Their only kiss, up until he pressed Steve between himself and the wall and Steve let him. He can remember, now, how the booze made him stupid and brave and how Steve looked almost like an angel in the glow of the streetlights. They'd been alone, in the middle of the night, stumbling home from the bar, his arm slung around Steve's shoulders. He can't remember what he ordered to drink that night, but he can remember the heat of Steve's body pressed against his on the walk back.

When Steve complained about Bucky getting all the attention, he hadn't even hesitated. He'd pushed Steve up against the brick of the alley with the same foolhardy hunger he'd pushed him against the drywall of the apartment. Steve just treated like a joke, after, (“Aw, lay off it, Buck—I didn't mean a kiss from your dumb mug.) but he'd still kissed back, his thin fingers wrapped around Bucky's lapels.

Steve's reaction now makes a sickening amount of sense, even if Bucky feels red with shame when he thinks how pathetic he must have seemed: clinging to a drunken memory like it could make sense of everything.

“I'm sorry,” he says one morning, the word quiet and foreign in his mouth. There's no need to explain what for; they don't talk enough for there to be any confusion. Bucky doesn't have anything else to be sorry about. 

He hates knowing that the heat of Steve under his hands was the first thing that felt real in months.

He stays with Steve because it's familiar, not because it's comfortable. Nothing about this place is comfortable.

(Eventually it gets less strained—living under Captain America's roof. The more he remembers, the easier it gets, because Steve stops feeling like a stranger and starts feeling like a friend. Sometimes, he calls Steve “Stevie” without even thinking about it, and it always makes Steve go tense and then relaxed—like someone working an ache from a muscle. The smile he offers always seems a little too tight around the eyes.

Bucky remembers, with startling clarity, the day he was drafted. More than that, he remembers how desperately he didn't want to be, and how he'd locked himself in his room trying to talk himself down from the fear and the doubt and the sickening regret. And the guilt, god the guilt, when he let himself consider dodging the draft and disappearing to Canada. Steve had been trying so hard to enlist, back then, even though he could never pass the physical. Steve wanted to fight for their country more than anything. Bucky—he couldn't stand the thought of how Steve would look at him, what Steve would think of him. But joining the army felt like a curse up until Steve was there fighting along with him.

Him and Steve—they talk now. Sometimes it's still stilted and perfunctory. And there are days were Steve shifts into that soft, placating voice Bucky hates and he has to grit his way through well-meaning questions about what he remembers. But sometimes they just talk, and Bucky likes that.

Steve is a good man. For all his questions, he doesn't seem to expect Bucky to be the same person he lost seventy years back. The strangest part of it all is—Bucky feels like he is that man just as often as he feels like he isn't. 

Steve gets up from his spot on the couch and goes to his room. On the way past, he runs his hand absent-mindedly over the short hair at the back of Bucky's skull and Bucky leans into the touch. Funny, he thinks, how something barely remembered could seem so familiar.)

The thing about having a history is that Bucky never asked for one. And waking up from seventy years of brainwashing and torture into the life of Captain America's best friend is worse than surreal—because suddenly the whole country knows him better than he does: his name, his reputation, the fall that should have killed him. Even then, he might have still been able to live his life in anonymity.

That is, if paparazzi hadn't caught him hanging around Captain America himself. Didn't take long for the press to figure out what looked so familiar about him. Fury and Tony put together a press release that's practically air-tight: one true enough to feed the sharks but vague enough to save Bucky whatever's left of his dignity.

He hadn't had much of that as the Winter Soldier—dignity. He isn't sure how he feels about the whole thing. Zola taught him to be an attack dog. He was good at it. The man they talk about in the papers doesn't feel like him at all: not the Bucky he remembers or the soldier he wishes he didn't or the man he's become in wake of them both.

Too many things didn't make it into the press release—like how, the first time they wiped him, he nearly bit through his tongue. Or how, the second time, it wasn't a rubber mouth-piece, it was a belt: folded over and shoved into his mouth while he screamed. There was no “dignity” in that laboratory.

The release talked about the brainwashing but not about how there was never such a thing as a clean wipe. Even Steve doesn't know about the way his kills would follow him two, sometimes three, wipes later. They were ghosts, echos, cigarette burns around the edges of his thoughts, nothing tangible. But there was one—he remembers it now, even though the time-line of what he did in that mask doesn't feel at all linear—there was one who hung on. She lingered. The daughter of a foreign dignitary. He'd killed her to send a message. It took more than half a dozen wipes to stop the nightmares.

He can remember a voice—Natalia's?—in the middle of a mission calling “he's compromised. Repeat, Winter Soldier has been compromised,” over the comm when the sight of a girl in the streets—god, she looked so similar he'd swear it was the same one—had him going off mission.

He didn't see Natalia again, after that. Not for years and years. And now they skirt around each other, afraid of what the other one represents.

Stark's press release calls him “rehabilitated,” but Bucky doesn't feel rehabilitated at all. He feels like a feral animal on a short leash. He feels like gnawing his own leg off.

(“Don't tell me you never thought about it,” Bucky murmurs, sliding into Steve's lap like he belongs there. Bucky learned how to do more than just kill as the Winter Soldier. There were missions where they needed intel—times when he needed to charm and seduce. So he knows just how to pitch his voice, just how ghost his breath against Steve's jaw. He knows what people look like when they want him. He knows—

He knows he used to bring girls home, back before the war, and use them to bury deeper, uglier feelings he didn't think he was allowed to feel.

Steve—he's still the only thing that feels real after months of learning and unlearning who he is. And Steve makes this soft, dazed little sound underneath him. Whispers, “Bucky,” in a way that sends chills running down his back. His hands find Bucky's waist like he can't help himself and it feels like a victory.

“I've seen the way you look at me, Rogers,” he breathes, the words colored with a smile and half a moan. When he touches Steve's neck, Steve's shiver reminds him how cold his metal hand must be, and he chases the aftershocks of it with his mouth. The sound Steve makes when Bucky's lips touch his neck is nothing short of gorgeous and he wants to make Steve do it again. But he knows not to rush. He was trained better than that.

“It's the twenty-first century, captain,” the word rolls off his tongue like honey, and when he dips into a ghost of a kiss, he can feel Steve craning up to try and meet him. He runs his thumbs over Steve's jaw and savors the way every word brushes their mouths together. Steve is practically shaking underneath him, his grip on Bucky's hips something close to bruising.

Bucky was trained for this. He knows how to go in for the kill.

“You don't have to deny yourself what you want, anymore.”

He's stupid. He's cocky and foolhardy and he lets his guard down, and suddenly kissing Steve turns into Steve shoving him to one side and rushing to his feet. Bucky's still trying to get his head together when Steve whirls on him—furious in a way Bucky didn't even know he was capable of.

“That—” he snarls, expression clouded and dark, “Don't you ever do that to me again. Whatever the hell it was.”

Bucky doesn't understand. He doesn't understand how Steve could want him the way he does and still—

“You wanted to kiss me,” Bucky snaps and there's this horrible moment where Steve's face goes open and shocked. That is, before the rage sets back in.

“That's not what I fucking meant and you know it,” Steve hisses before grabbing his coat and leaving the apartment like a thunderstorm.

Bucky feels sick. He remembers too much of the person he used to be to justify using Winter Soldier's tactics against Bucky Barnes' best friend.

There's still too much monster and not enough man under his skin.)

Bucky gets his memory back in pieces and it's breaking Steve's heart.

At first, Bucky thinks it's the forgetting that's hardest for Steve to handle—the way they've spent almost a year under this roof and there are parts of Bucky that are still a stranger. But as the gaps in his memory get smaller and smaller, he thinks maybe it's the opposite. He thinks maybe it would be easier for Steve if Bucky was nothing but a ghost of his best friend, and not the walking husk of what's left of him.

Bucky doesn't understand it and he doesn't know how to act. Even if he remembers the version of himself that was calm and charming, the one who always knew how to take care of Steve, he's not good at it anymore. He only ever seems to do the wrong thing. And after what he did, Steve is wary of getting too close to him.

Something between them feels broken, even after Bucky remembers all the inside jokes.

(“You don't owe me anything,” Steve says out of the blue, one day, “You know that, right?”

Bucky prickles when he realizes where it's coming from. He snaps his book closed and whirls on Steve. “So you think I'm, what? Trying to repay a favor? Paying my dues? Fuck you, Rogers.” He gets to his feet. Bucky never thought a man as big as Steve could ever look small, but Steve shrinks back from him and Bucky has to reign in the urge to spit in his face. At least fight me, he wants to say, at least fucking push back.

“Buck, listen--” And there's that voice again, the gentle one that makes Bucky's skin crawl. “I just don't want you doing this just because you think it's what I want--”

“It is what you want!” The outburst shocks the both of them, and Bucky's left in wide-eyed silence, wishing he could suck the words back into his mouth. A year after he gave up being the soldier, and there's still some part of him looking for praise, for validation.

Looking for a mission.

Bucky leaves. It's three weeks before he comes back.)

Before the war, Bucky was the type to put on a show, to build a persona. He cared too much what people thought about him and he was good at winning people over. As the Winter Soldier, Bucky turned that into a weapon. He used it to get close to people. To get what he wanted. To kill.

The person he is now—he doesn't have the stomach for the charade. When he comes back to Steve, it's with empty arms and a tired expression. He drops his bag beside the door and settles on the couch without speaking. Steve hesitates before sitting down beside him. Someday, Bucky thinks, maybe Steve will stop treating him like a live grenade.

The thought makes a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. Bucky's heard the stories. He knows what Steve does with “live” grenades. Maybe he wouldn't really mind so much if Steve treated him like one.

They're silent for a long time. Bucky weighs the things he could say, but none of the pomp and circumstance holds up against the truth. Bucky before the war was a charmer. Bucky after the war was a liar. He doesn't want to mince words, anymore.

“I was in love with you,” he says, and the words settle like dust in the empty of the room. Steve has gone unnaturally still, beside him. When he turns to look, Steve is staring at his hands. Bucky takes a breath. “It's why I—it's why this was so messy. I couldn't tell the difference between that and what we actually were.” He's said his piece. He gets to his feet with a small sigh—never been the type for heart-to-hearts, even before Nazi scientists tried to cut his out. He heads for his room. “Just thought you should know.”

He doesn't even hear Steve get to his feet, but the man catches his wrist and Bucky wonders which one of them is more surprised when his first instinct is to lean into the touch instead of yank away from it. When he turns around, Steve's wearing an expression he's never seen before. He doesn't miss the way Steve's eyes dart to his mouth, or how he worries his bottom lip with his teeth while he looks for whatever it is he's trying to say.

The feeling in Bucky's metal arm is crude—utilitarian and without nuance. Made for killing and nothing else, but in the basest of ways, he can still feel the way Steve's thumb draws across his wrists and along the divots in the metal. He hasn't let go, yet. Bucky isn't sure that he will.

“What about now?” Steve asks and Bucky's mouth goes dry. Sometimes, his love for Steve is just another ghost that followed him through the decades. (He didn't say—he's never mentioned—that the memory of Steve was the hardest to wipe, that it stayed the longest. He thinks that part must be obvious. Steve, after all, is the only thing that ever got through to him.)

Sometimes, that love is a ghost. Sometimes, it seems so big and impossible, just watching Steve out of the corner of his eye is enough to knock the wind out of him.

The words, when they come, are steady even if his expression is less guarded than it's been in a long, long time.

“I barely know who I am, these days. But I remembered you.”

Steve doesn't say anything to that, but he looks a little like he's been struck. Or kissed. Bucky isn't sure he knows the difference.

When the silence drags on, his eyes track down to where Steve is still holding his wrist. No one touches him like this—gentle, like this. Not without an agenda. The metal doesn't give like skin and he wonders if Steve hates it. He cracks a sharp, bitter excuse for a smile and asks, “Not like you remember, huh?”

“Bucky,” Steve scoffs, and he's got that damnable softness about him again but Bucky doesn't think he hates it quite as much, this time. “Tony's got a house that can talk. Nothing is like I remember it.”

The trouble with Steve is he refuses to believe his best friend could be anything less than a saint, which might even be funny if it weren't so tangled up in hurt. Even now, even after everything, Bucky can't stand the thought of disappointing Steve. At least, not any more than he already has. But Steve holds him to a standard Bucky can't possibly live up to.

Bucky's gentle when he tugs his arm away from Steve's grasp. He runs his own fingers along the metal wrist, and there's something halfway self conscious about the gesture. The Winter Soldier would call it a Tell, but he's not that person, anymore. No matter how much of that life haunts his nightmares.

He doesn't look at Steve, because the smile that quirks his mouth doesn't quite reach his eyes. He thinks Steve notices, anyway. “I don't get it. You won't let me kiss you, but you'll ask if I still love you like it even matters.”

“It matters.” Steve stops and hunts for the right words; he's always been so despicably earnest. Bucky doesn't know if he's jealous or proud. “You were looking for answers, Buck. I didn't want you to find them like that.”

“So we really weren't like that, back then.” Steve shakes his head and Bucky leans against the door frame of his room and watches him, arms crossed over his chest. “Did you want us to be?”

“God, yes,” Steve says in a rush and Bucky actually laughs at the naked honesty of it.

“Christ, we were a pair, huh? Only kissed you when I was drunk 'cause I thought it was the only way I'd get away with it.” Something in the way Steve is looking at him changes, and Bucky knows it's only because he's seeing too much of he past creeping in around the edges. Bucky's expression softens. 

Right now, he barely knows how to be a person, much less how to take care of someone else. But he loved this man. God, he loved this man. He thinks he could probably love him again, if given the chance. His voice comes out gentler than he thought he was capable of, anymore. “We're never gonna be what we were, Steve. We've seen too much.”

There's a silence, and Bucky wonders if that's it—if this is where Steve admits he can't do this anymore. But Steve meets his gaze and there's something so stubborn behind it, it has Bucky going still and silent. This—this is the kid from Brooklyn Bucky would have died for (did die for), during the war.

“I don't want what we were.”

Steve steps forward and Bucky doesn't like being boxed in, these days. But it's Steve, and it's only a moment before Bucky can feel himself relaxing. He thinks Steve is going to kiss him. He wants Steve to kiss him.

It's embarrassing, the shocked little sound he makes when Steve wraps his arms around him and buries his face in Bucky's neck, instead.

“Easy, big guy,” Bucky murmurs finally, arms lifting to wrap around Steve's back and return the hug. “I gotcha.”


End file.
